July 8, 2016
CapitalPress.com
7
Idaho ag welcomes Little’s run for governor Study: Plastic crates no
By SEAN ELLIS
Capital Press
BOISE — News that Idaho
Lt. Gov. Brad Little will run
for governor was welcomed
by the state’s farm and ranch
industry.
Little, 62, is a rancher and
farmer from Emmett who has
been active in the state’s agri-
cultural industry his entire life.
“We have an excellent re-
lationship with Brad,” said
Leadore rancher Carl Lufkin.
“He’s been an ally of our in-
dustry. I certainly am going to
support him.”
Gov. Butch Otter, who has
been Idaho’s governor since
2007 and is also a rancher, has
said he will not seek re-elec-
tion.
Little iled the paperwork
necessary to run for governor
June 29.
Idaho’s next gubernatorial
election is in 2018. Little said
he iled now because a lot of
people around the state have
Sean Ellis/Capital Press
Idaho Lt. Gov. Brad Little has
iled paperwork to run for gov-
ernor in 2018.
been asking him if he’s run-
ning but they couldn’t oficial-
ly support him or raise money
for his campaign until the pa-
perwork was iled.
Little served in the Idaho
Senate from 2001 to 2009,
when he was appointed by Ot-
ter as lieutenant governor. He
was elected to that position in
2010 and has been re-elected
two times since.
“Brad has done a good job
as lieutenant governor and ... I
believe he is an ally for agri-
culture,” said Meridian farmer
Drew Eggers. “I’m pleased
personally that he is running.”
A third-generation Idaho
rancher, Little owns a ranching
and farming operation in Em-
mett and the family of his wife,
Teresa Soulen, has farmed and
ranched in Idaho for almost
150 years.
He is a former chairman of
the Idaho Wool Growers Asso-
ciation.
“Brad Little is Idaho agri-
culture,” Food Producers of
Idaho Executive Director Rick
Waitley told Capital Press in
an email. “Being a product of
a strong Idaho farm and ranch
family, the lieutenant gover-
nor understands the important
value the industry adds to the
state.”
Waitley said Little as a sen-
ator and lieutenant governor
has interacted frequently with
FPI, which represents most
of the state’s farm groups. As
past president of the Idaho
Association of Commerce and
Industry, Little also sees “the
value of the industry when our
commodities leave the farm,”
he said.
Little said one of his main
priorities as governor would
be to seek to lighten the bur-
den of federal regulations on
Idaho farmers and ranchers.
“Federal regulations are a
continual challenge to agri-
culture,” he said. “We have to
make those as painless as pos-
sible and push back on a lot
of them.”
Little said another top goal
would be to ensure the state
creates the type of economic
climate that allows Idahoans
from farm as well as non-farm
families to remain in or come
back to rural communities
that depend on agriculture’s
economic contribution.
“I would love to have my
legacy be that families in Ida-
ho were able to have their kids
stay and come back and thrive
here in Idaho,” he said.
safer than old wooden
boxes for storing onions
By SEAN ELLIS
Capital Press
ONTARIO, Ore. — Plas-
tic crates are no more sanitary
for storing onions than the old
wooden boxes packers in this
area have used for decades, ac-
cording to a study by Oregon
State University researchers.
The study results could
prove extremely valuable to
dry bulb onion growers if new
Food and Drug Administration
food safety regulations require
the use of plastic crates, as some
onion growers fear.
There are an estimated 1
million wooden boxes used for
storing onions in Southwestern
Idaho and Eastern Oregon, the
largest bulb onion producing re-
gion in the country by volume.
Replacing them with more
expensive plastic crates would
be an enormous expense for
the region’s onion industry, said
Kay Riley, manager of Snake
River Produce in Nyssa.
If onions were required to be
stored in plastic crates instead of
wooden boxes, “We’d just quit,
I think,” said Riley, the mar-
keting order chairman for the
Idaho-Eastern Oregon Onion
Committee, “We’d just throw in
the towel.”
Riley said the wooden crates
cost a little more than $60
apiece, while the plastic bins
available on the market now
cost about $150 apiece.
The wooden boxes hold al-
most 1,600 pounds of onions,
while the smaller plastic bins
would hold 900 pounds.
“It would be a substantial
cost” to switch to plastic con-
tainers, said OSU cropping sys-
tems extension agent Stuart Re-
itz, who conducted the container
tests with Clint Shock, director
of OSU’s Malheur County re-
search station.
Because the plastic crates
are a different size, some onion
packers would have to retro-
it their storage facilities to use
them, Reitz said.
The Food Safety Moderniza-
tion Act mandates that produce
storage containers be sanitary
for their intended purpose, and
Reitz said the onion industry
is concerned that could lead to
an effort to replace the wooden
boxes with plastic crates under
the assumption the plastic con-
tainers are more sanitary.
To test that theory, Reitz and
Shock conducted a trial in 2015
using onions grown under both
furrow and drip irrigation sys-
tems.
Onions harvested under both
systems were packed into 10
wooden crates and 10 plastic
containers, stored for six weeks
and then tested for generic E.
coli and other potentially harm-
ful bacteria.
“We haven’t seen any dif-
ference in contamination of the
onions from the container type,”
Reitz said. “There doesn’t seem
to be any need to change con-
tainer types.”
A big reason for that is sim-
ply that the onions themselves
are not contaminated, Reitz said,
something OSU researchers
have shown in previous trials.
“The containers are not
spreading any pathogens to be-
gin with because they simply
weren’t there from the onions in
the irst place,” he said.
The plastic crates used in
the trial were sterilized with a
bleach solution and rinsed with
distilled water, then dried in the
sun.
31st Annual Capital Press Ag Weekly
Courtesy of Almond Board of Calif.
An Iron Wolf grinds up a whole almond tree and puts the woody biomass materials back into the soil during a University of California
Cooperative Extension-hosted demonstration in Chowchilla, Calif., earlier this year. The UC is researching use of the device as a way to
help growers improve their soil quality.
Almond board funds UC orchard recycling research
Capital Press
MODESTO, Calif. — The
Almond Board of California
is buying into the concept of
grinding up whole orchards
and putting the biomass ma-
terial back into the ground to
improve soil quality.
The board has given
$145,000 to a University
of California research team
that’s been testing the feasi-
bility of “recycling” old or-
chards on a test plot in Chow-
chilla, Calif., near Fresno.
With the grant, UC Co-
operative Extension advisor
Brent Holtz and others will
join USDA researchers in
assessing the costs and ben-
eits of such projects at sev-
eral test sites in the Central
Valley, said Carissa Sauer, of
Modesto. She is the board’s
manager of industry commu-
nications.
“Should this research
provide evidence to support
a change in almond farming
practices, these recycling
efforts could have major
impacts on air quality, soil
health and overall production
eficiency, contributing to
the greater sustainability of
California almonds,” Sauer
told the Capital Press in an
email.
She said the approach
seems to mimic nature “by
following the lead of forests
across the globe which are
fueled by fallen logs and their
decomposing tree biomass,”
she said.
Holtz held a ield day for
growers earlier this year to
demonstrate a device called
the Iron Wolf, which uproots
and grinds whole orchard
trees and incorporates the
woody biomass into the soil.
Holtz, who is based in
Stockton, Calif., told the
gathering that studies he’s
been doing since 2003 have
shown that whole-orchard
chip incorporation treat-
ments increased organic
matter, soil carbon, nutri-
ents and microbial diversity
— all to the benefit of new
plantings.
Recycling old orchards
that are being taken out to
make room for new ones
could come in handy for
growers who’ve been look-
ing for alternative ways to
dispose of biomass after
some Central Valley cogen-
eration plants have closed in
recent years.
In addition, growers in
recent years have report-
ed an increase in problems
with salinity in groundwater,
which the orchard grind-
ing experiments have been
shown to alleviate.
Among the researchers’
goals is to assess the costs
and benefits of different
methods of grinding up or-
chard biomass and incorpo-
rating it into the soil and to
determine whether whole-or-
chard recycling could reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by
further sequestering the car-
bon stored by almond trees,
Sauer said.
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